For that cause, when Ptolemy, king of Egypt, had posed the seventy interpreters in order, and asked the nineteenth man what would make one sleep quietly in the night, he told him “the best way was to have divine and celestial meditations, and to use honest actions in the daytime.” Lod. Vives wonders how schoolmen could sleep quietly and were not terrified in the night, they had such monstrous questions and thought of such terrible matters all day long. They had need amongst the rest to sacrifice to god Morpheus, whom Philostratus paints in a white and black coat, with a horn, and ivory box full of dreams of the same colours, to signify good and bad.
Cast. These are the manufacture, I presume, of two of those sons of sleep, born to him by a beautiful but erring grace, “Phantasus,” or Fancy, and “Phobetor,” or Terror. With the relations and illustrations of these good and bad dreams, the pages of both fiction and authentic history abound: another poetical batch of causes, Ida. Lucia exclaims:
“Sweet are the slumbers of the virtuous man,
Oh Marcia! I have seen thy godlike father —
A kind refreshing sleep is fallen upon him.
I saw him stretch’d at ease, his fancy lost
In pleasing dreams. As I drew near his couch,
He smil’d, and cried: ‘Cæsar, thou cans’t not hurt me.’ ”
Another poet writes thus:
“But most we mark the wonders of her reign,